The need to safely and economically dispose of industrial and household wastes in an environmentally acceptable manner has inspired a designers to propose a variety of waste processing systems utilizing high temperatures generated by plasma sources. One advantage of such plasma systems is their ability to turn inorganic portions of a waste into a glass, or vitrified, form which exhibits long term stability when the vitrified material is deposited in a landfill. Examples of such systems are found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,471, filed Mar. 16, 1998, U.S. Pat. No. 5,847,353, filed Aug. 7, 1996, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,811,752 and 5,756,957, both filed Mar. 25, 1996, U.S. Pat. No. 5,798,497, filed Jun. 19, 1995, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,666,891, filed Feb. 2, 1995, all of which are incorporated herein by this reference.
Typically, within these high temperature systems, the energy value of organic materials is recovered by gasifying the materials, to converting them into useful energy sources. Gasification of organic materials consists of a complex combination of reactions including thermal decomposition; full and partial oxidation with steam, carbon dioxide, and oxygen; and the water gas shift reaction (CO+H2O=CO2+H2). Thermal decomposition (also referred to as pyrolysis) results in the formation of very fine solid carbon particles. This material, although not favored by equilibrium thermodynamics, is slow to react and often remains un-reacted until it is removed by the offgas cleaning equipment. This material impacts the process economics in two ways—first it's heating value is lost from the product fuel gas and second removal of this carbon particulate increase offgas cleaning costs. For these reasons, designers of high temperature waste treatment systems have long sought methods and techniques that may by used to eliminate or reduce carbon particulate, sometimes referred to as “carbon carryover.” Examples of such methods and techniques include U.S. Pat. No. 6,576,210, filed Aug. 22, 2001, which describes a method for destroying carbon carryover created in high temperature plasma waste treatment systems by first capturing carbon carryover in a slurry, and then directing the slurry back into the high temperature plasma waste treatment system to convert the carbon into a synthesis gas. The entire contents of this patent, and all other patents, papers, or other publications referenced in the remainder of this disclosure are hereby incorporated in their entirety by this reference. Despite the advantages taught in U.S. Pat. No. 6,576,210, the further reduction or elimination of carbon particulate is still a universal goal among designers of high temperature waste treatment systems, as any reduction in carbon particulate improves overall process economics.